Mrs Taylor has been exceptionally patient, but she’s starting to make frustrated mutterings. This Range Rover appears in printd pages under the name of Yours Truly but it’s really her car – and in two years she’s seen it twice and driven it nowhere.
I’d provisionally arranged to have it back over the summer to give it a mechanical shakedown. It now has an MoT and the man behind the Rangie’s resurrection, Stan Tooth at Readingbased Turbo 4x4, reckons it drives rather well. But the final bill was a bit bigger than I’d expected. Actually it was a lot bigger than I expected – so the handover has been delayed.
When J180 OAC was last reported on, Stan was trying to save the headlining. However, the foam backing had disintegrated so badly that there was nothing to glue the fabric to any more. We settled for a replacement from Nationwide Trim, whose products I have used before.
There was a certain amount of swearing when I dropped in to see how the fitting-up of the headlining was going, so I left in a hurry.
No restoration is ever easy, but I don’t feel I’ve contributed much to this one yet – except for putting my signature on a few cheques. That’s immensely frustrating: I just want to get my hands on the thing now.
A recent trip to Switzerland that saw me driving a rather nice Range Rover of similar vintage just made things worse!
I’ve only been able to console myself by reading that I’m not only the sucker for Range Rover punishment, as I was amused to see Calum Brown’s also bought himself a similar one and is already discovering how much can go wrong after 20 years of neglect. I wonder who will have theirs on the road first?
As for Mrs Taylor, I’ve managed to distract her with work on the garden. The problem is that costs money too, and I’ve just the one bank account...
